Townsend Working Group in Contemporary Art

 The goal of the Townsend Center Working Group in Contemporary Art is to broaden conversations across disciplines and institutions. Scholarship in contemporary art occurs across many departments on campus well beyond History of Art—Rhetoric/Film Studies, New Media, Art Practice—yet most opportunities for interaction are either extremely narrow (e.g. the personal conversation, the classroom) or broad (e.g. the public lecture, the exhibition). Our aim is to establish an intimate forum that fosters conversation and information sharing among faculty, curators, students and artists. Over the course of the past two years, we have organized lectures followed by extensive discussion and Q&A—inspired by the seminar format—by Berkeley faculty, postdocs, curators and artists. For the 2011-2012 year, we will host a series of bimonthly meetings; one meeting each month will feature a presentation on contemporary art by a Berkeley graduate student, followed by discussion, and one meeting each month will follow our traditional format of lecture/seminar by faculty, curators, or artists. However, this year we will extend our lectures to speakers from other institutions, including, but not limited to, local museums, other colleges and universities, and contemporary art galleries.